Amazon partners stake claims in AWS cloud ecosystem

Amazon(S amzn) Web Services of today bears more than a passing resemblance to Microsoft(s msft) of 20 years ago. It’s a powerful company that is dominant in its field , surrounded by hundreds (thousands) or smaller software vendors trying to bask in its reflected glow and hopefully make some money filling in the gaps in its product offerings. And, to borrow the phrase of former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner, they are all trying to finesse the dangers of dancing with an elephant.

Day one of the second annual AWS Re:Invent conference was taken up by a hackathon, a raft of training sessions and hundreds of AWS-related press releases. Here are a few that caught my eye.

Mainframe 2, a startup that aims to run thousands of heavy-duty non-web Windows and Linux applications on HTML 5-supporting browsers without plug-ins, now supports Amazon’s fancy new GPU instance. That means customers…